Former Mt. Gox CEO’s Proposal to Rewrite Bitcoin Code to Recover $5 Billion Rejected
Mt. Gox was once one of the world’s leading Bitcoin exchanges. About 80,000 BTC stolen in a 2011 hack remain at addresses linked to the theft. Former CEO Mark Karpelès advocated rewriting Bitcoin Core rules to recover the assets. The proposal was sensitive because altering the ledger for a single historical case could undermine trust in Bitcoin’s immutability and decentralized governance.
Karpelès recently proposed modifying the Bitcoin Core code and carrying out a hard fork to reallocate the 80,000 BTC stolen in 2011, valued at about $5 billion, to an address controlled by the Mt. Gox trustee. The Bitcoin Core developer community and Mt. Gox creditors swiftly opposed the plan, arguing that it would violate existing consensus rules. The proposal was therefore rejected and did not proceed to deployment.
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The history behind this eventFormer Mt. Gox CEO Proposes Hard Fork to Recover 80,000 Stolen Bitcoin
Mt. Gox was once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. It was hacked in 2011 and filed for bankruptcy in 2014, leaving creditors seeking repayment for more than a decade. The proposal challenges Bitcoin's principle of transaction irreversibility. Rewriting consensus rules to reassign specific assets could set a major precedent for recovering stolen onchain funds and governing the protocol.
On February 27, 2026, former CEO Mark Karpelès submitted a proposal to the Bitcoin Core GitHub repository calling for a one-time hard fork. It would transfer 79,956 Bitcoin that had not moved since 2011 to a recovery address controlled by the Mt. Gox trustee. The holdings were valued at about $5.2 billion at the time. If adopted, the assets would be legally returned to creditors, but the pull request was closed shortly after it was submitted.
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